Author: Eugene

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Another turtle heads back home

Another recovered sea turtle is being released back into the ocean this weekend by the SC Aquarium. Any stranded or injured sea turtles found in the area usually end up recuperating in the Sea Turtle Hospital. This weekend Edisto gets to go back to where he belongs. Come on out and watch! Then you can stick around, interrogateask the aquarium staff questions and hang out on the beach.

Edisto’s release at the Folly Beach County Park is going to be held between 11:30 a.m. and noon on Saturday, October 13th. The time is being pushed forward a bit to give the high tide a little time to go out, hopefully allowing us all to be on the beach with the turtle!

Now, a few things to remember:

The County Parks cost $5 per car to park in their facilities.

This is a HUGE, live animal so if there are delays, please bear with us. There are far worse places to be than on the beach waiting for a sea turtle!

It will probably be crowded so be kind to the folks around you, especially if they are small!

The turtle is going in rain or shine.

The most important thing is to have fun! Interact with Aquarium Staff and Volunteers on the beach and enjoy the release.
It’s right toward the end of my volunteer shift at the Aquarium, so I’m going to try to head out there with my camera as soon as I finish. I’ll have to work fast and try to get done a little early so I make it out there on time.

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Big screen Trek

I need to go see this

On Tuesday, November 13, the two-part Star Trek Remastered version of “The Menagerie” will beam onto the big screen in a special engagement with selected theatres. The screening — a first for episodic Star Trek on this scale — will be seen in nearly 300 venues across the U.S. and Canada. This one-night-only event will also feature a special introduction by Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, plus an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Remastered series.

Here are the theatres it’s showing at in the Charleston area

  • Movies @ Mt. Pleasant Stadium 12, Mount Pleasant
  • Charles Towne Square Stadium 18, North Charleston
  • Movies @ Azalea Square 16, Summerville

It starts at 7:30PM. Anybody want to join me? I’ll probably go to the showing in Mt. Pleasant, but I’m flexible.

I’ve only seen a couple episodes of the Remastered series. The local station (WTAT) shows it at the most inconvenient time (Sundays at 1AM). I think I’ll just wait for the DVD.

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Fire trucks

At about 9:20 as I was crossing the Ashley River bridge heading into work this morning (trying to catch up on x-ray equipment surveys), there was this long slow moving procession of fire trucks headed the other way into West Ashley. Lights flashing, sirens wailing but apparently not in a hurry to get anywhere.
Not sure where they were headed or what occasion they were marking, but they were going somewhere. Anybody out there know what they were doing?

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Upgrading Fedora sans DVD

The Fedora LiveCD image is pretty cool for new installations but as I’ve discovered, not much good for upgrading an existing Fedora. Fedora’s done away with the CD ISO images (probably a good thing, since Fedora 6 consisted of 5 CD ISO images) and only makes DVD images available now. Since my desktop doesn’t have a DVD burner or reader, I thought I was going to be stuck. After doing a bit of research and experimenting, I’ve come up with a procedure that let me upgrade my desktop from Fedora 8 Test 2 to Test 3 that seems to have worked. It’s based on this message from fedora-list.

Disclaimer: The following steps worked fine for me on my system. Since it was a relatively minor upgrade from one test version to another, I’ve encountered very little breakage (so far). You may have to adjust things a little to get it to work on yours. YMMV.

  1. Download the Fedora ISO for your architecture
  2. Mount the ISO using the loopback device:
    mount iso_filename /mnt/Fedora -t iso9660 -o loop
    replacing iso_filename with the filename of the Fedora ISO you just downloaded
  3. Create the directory /boot/Fedora and copy the contents of /mnt/Fedora/isolinux there
  4. Add the following to /etc/grub.conf (add it to the end of the file):
    title Fedora
root (hd0,0)
kernel /Fedora/vmlinuz
initrd /Fedora/initrd.img
  5. Copy the ISO image to another computer and mount it to some location as in Step 2 (I used Fedora in my home directory). I had to do this step because I couldn’t get the upgrade process to find the DVD image on the local hard drive. I think it may have had to do with the image being on an LVM partition. If you don’t have any LVM partitions, you may be able to skip this step.
  6. Create an NFS export for the mounted Fedora image you just created.
  7. Reboot and select the Fedora boot profile. If all goes well, the computer should boot up using the new Fedora image and the upgrade process should kick off.
  8. Follow the prompts to the point where it asks where the Fedora disk image is
  9. Select the NFS option and provide the host and full path information to where you mounted the ISO on the remote computer (from Step 5).
  10. At this point the upgrade should proceed as if you were upgrading from a physical DVD

If anybody knows a better way, feel free to enlighten me.

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10 years of /.

In Internet time, Slashdot is the great grand-daddy of all the techie news sites. This month /. is marking its 10 year anniversary with locally organized gatherings all over the place. Almost makes me feel old to think that I’ve been reading /. for nearly all of those 10 years.

The local gathering of /.ers is set up for Terri’s Sports Bar on James Island on Oct 20 at 8PM. Should be fun to meet other /.ers around here. Go sign up and let the rest of us know if you’re coming.